[Geek God]

Hey Bear Nemeses, If you put aluminum foil (0.1 lbs/cu inch, very light!!) on the back of your Pair o' Cheaters map, it is multi use. Turn it over, put it on your lap, and tan under your chin and the bottoms of your earlobes. It's wonderful for building up resistance to sunburn from snow reflection. Glad your LED light with a Parageter map tells you where you are. I carry a map of Underground Seattle to tell me where I'm not. I also carry an LED headlight. I find myself thinking about it a lot when high above surrounding terrain, bathed in sunlight, with North Cascade peaks rising all about like frantic fish feeding at the fish farm. Wow, too many "f" words in one sentence. I think I over alliterated. That's what happens when you get all misty about a torch. Anyway the gear makes the trip, no doubt about it! Some of my friends will gather their best gear, make a cairn out of it, then they bow to it like the pope on Good Friday. Then they sing Gregarious Chants whilst mumbling Druid sayings. I find their gear worship a bit humorous, but whatever turns 'em on! Ya gotta hike your own hike! Dang, I have to return some gear I've been testing. Try the "Kilgore" ultralight pack. $200, white Spectra, less than 1.5 lbs. Santa giveth, and Santa asketh it to be returneth. Almighty Backpacker editor says Christmas is over. Back to Lowe tech...

[Bare niceties]

[-lol-]

[polarbear]

I have Topo's central cascades, north and south. It's a great tool. I want to get the N. Cascades discs but the REI closest to me (I thought there would never be a day that I said that) was out of them. Any one here like Tom know where I can get the best price on these discs? Maybe nwhikers should buy an old building and form a buyer's co-op. I use the build profile tool alot. What would be cool is if you could mark a beginning point and an end point and it would automatically give you the route of least resistance plus a few alternate routes that might be slightly shorter but a bit harder. Ahhhh....armchair hiking

[Malachai Constant]

Polarbear 19.95 at REI on line LINK

[Tom]

If one can buy the 3 regional series that make up most of Washington for $60 = $20 x 3 at REI, why would anyone shell out $100 for the state series with lower resolution? Wait a sec, $40 more just to upload/download waypoints?

[Alan Bauer]

Simple: there is no coverage for anything out of the mountains on those 3 discs. Sure, it isn't for everyone apparently, but I spend huge amounts of time east of the Cascades, and having maps helping out with jeep tracks and topo for the desert basin areas of public land is invaluable! Even simple things like close in common areas like Yakima Skyline, Umtanum, and Manastash Ridge are out of these sets bounds I believe. Do those discs cover the Okanogan areas, Kettle Range, NE corner of the state? Ah, back to printing out maps to other winter/spring destinations in the desert...Rocky Ford, Dodd Canyon,........

[salish]

Alan - Bingo. The State series is all of the State. I do a lot of recreating in the same places you've mentioned, and the Quilomene, Colockum, as well as up in the Okanagon and in the extreme NE part of the state. The State series covers it all. Tom - I only spent $18.00 (with tax) on the Washington State TOPO! edition, at REI. My wife had been receiving $10/month car pooling incentive coupons for REI all year long from her place of employment and I simply used that for this TOPO! program. I'm still smiling over that.

[Sir Vayor]

Tom, I don't believe the 3 regionals can run seamlessly between them. Admittedly this is only a factor when on the edge. But if you enjoy the Suiattle River area you'll see what I mean. The statewide version is seamless. I wonder if it's seamless from, say, Washington to Orygun?

[Sore Feet]

It's not seamless between states. I've got both Washington and Oregon, and with the exception of the maps that share both states (Bridal Veil, Beacon Rock, Bonneville Dam, Mt. Defiance, etc), Oregon is totally seperate from Washington, though if you've got dual CD drives (as I do), as long as you've got a disc from each state in each drive, it takes two seconds to change states.

[Sir Vayor]

You can copy the data from CDs to hard drive. Details on their website, but if I recall you just copy the WA_Dxx directory from CDs. It runs a lot faster that way, plus it's seamless for the entire state (no disk swappin').

[mvs]

Hang on, I've got 3 Washington regional TOPO! CD-ROMs, and I've got the state series. It has full resolution. If you have an older CD-ROM (state or regional), and go to www.topo.com, you can download a new viewer that has better zoom in control (actually they call it magnify). So on both regional and state, I have 5 map zoom levels, and any of those maps can be magnified. If I'm missing out on something, please correct me. thank-ee!

[Tom]

Think of it like the difference between digital and optical zoom. You're talking digital zoom while we're talking optical zoom. Below I've magnified Topo! State by 200%. In challenging terrain it becomes illegible. See this thread for more comparisons.

Topo State at 200% vs. Full Resolution

[Sore Feet]

Certainly a valid observation. I just count the 200 foot contours when the 40 foot contours are too messy. I don't like Delormes because they didn't antialias the maps as they were scanned, so if you're not at full resolution, it's a bit crusty (the versions I've had in the past at least - maybe newer versions are cleaner). Especially bad were the older maps (the previous edition of Quartz Creek Butte 7", and Termination Point 7" comes to mind) To each his own though...